Localized Emotional Trauma

Have you ever cried and had no idea why you were crying? People’s emotions are difficult to understand. They are complex jumbles of feelings and perspectives. Emotions occur suddenly and sometimes inexplicably. The reason for the difficulty in understanding an individual’s emotions is because they aren’t an individual, and they frequently aren’t the one expressing the emotion through their body.

As mentioned in 3.2 The Source of Needs, one of the ways in which I started to notice that there was more to my body than machinery at my disposal was that it expressed feelings and perspectives that completely contradicted my own. I was sexually abused as a child. I dealt with what happened. It was no longer something that I thought about. It didn’t stress me. The memories were not a burden. I could talk about it freely and I was completely ok regarding it. However, my body, it turned out, had a different perspective.

As mentioned in 7.4 Dream Content, dreams are nodes attempting to convey something. I had a dream in which I was watching my body being abused back then, but another me was an abuser, accepting the abuse of the situation rather than getting out of the situation and saving my body from what happened. I woke up.

The first thing that I had to do was determine the validity of my interpretation of what happened in the dream. Did my body actually feel that way? How could it? I didn’t feel that way, and it was just a machine, wasn’t it? I conveyed the scenarios in Dolish to my body. It responded positively. It had made the dream, it was on purpose, and it did hate me for what I had done to it. It was still hurting.

Expressing & Apologizing

I put my attention on what ever I was communicating with and I tried amplifying its actions. I cried. I cried so much. It wasn’t me that was hurting. It wasn’t me that needed to get it out. I was letting another part of myself cry. All those years, it hadn’t had the chance. It wasn’t strong enough to make me cry itself. It needed help. I needed to give it some agency; some control. It cried. I queried if it wanted an apology. It responded that yes, it did. I apologized. It cried. I helped it cry through me. Then it stopped. It was ok. We were ok. I asked, just to be sure of it. I had mended a fence with that part of my body. We had made up. It would be ok.

What This Means for You

Therapists have a hard job. They have to help us grow and deal with matters that we don’t understand. Perhaps it would be an easier job if everyone was aware that the person that needs help doesn’t just not know what the problem is or what to do, but also isn’t the primary person involved that needs help. PTSD and other traumas also appear to function this way. If thoughts and dreams are invasive and harmful, it is extremely likely that the problem is emotional but does not involve the external person that you are having a conversation with. It is likely the internal population has the problem. Family therapy might be more applicable.